Nam Nha Pagoda

The name of this pagoda is written into its gate. Two gate posts carry a pair of couplets in Chinese characters. Take the first two characters of each line and put them together, and they spell Nam Nhã.

That is Nam Nhã Pagoda, also called Nam Nhã Đường or Nam Nhã Phật Đường. It is ranked as a national historic site, under Decision 154 of January 25, 1991. The old builders hid the name in the architecture as an invitation to come in, to turn toward what is good and toward the life of meditation.

The gate faces the Bình Thủy canal. The pagoda stands on the right bank, at the mouth of the Bình Thủy River. Across the water are the Bình Thủy communal house and the hamlet of Xóm Lưới. In the old days people traveled mostly by water, so many places of worship were built right at the riverbank, where visitors could arrive by boat.

Past the gate, a brick courtyard opens onto a large garden that runs down to the river. It holds tùng trees, trắc bá diệp trees and ancient trees. In the middle stands a miniature mountain, a hòn non bộ, more than two meters high, in a basin of water built of brick. The garden is quiet before you ever step into the main hall.

Nam Nhã is not only a Buddhist pagoda. It belongs to the Minh Sư school and honors the Three Teachings, which means that the sages of three great traditions share one altar. In the center of the main hall, three bronze figures stand together. They are Shakyamuni for Buddhism, Confucius for Confucianism, and Lao Tzu for Taoism. The pagoda gathers all three in a single room.

Beside its role as a place of worship, the pagoda has a patriotic history.

Its founder was Nguyễn Giác Nguyên, who also went by the name Nguyễn Phương Thảo. He was born in 1850 and died in 1919. Around 1890 he opened a traditional medicine shop called Nam Nhã Đường near Rạch Miễu Bridge, as a contact point against the French. In 1895 he built a small pagoda of three bays at the mouth of the Bình Thủy River. In 1905 it was rebuilt on a larger scale. In 1917 it was built again in brick and tile, the way it looks today.

In February 1913, the patriot Cường Để returned from France and talked about national affairs with Nguyễn Giác Nguyên here. The French found out, kept watch on the pagoda and closed it. In 1929, the Hậu Giang Special Committee of the Annam Communist Party was founded at Bình Thủy. The pagoda then became a contact point between that committee and the Nam Kỳ Regional Committee.

Today incense smoke still drifts in the main hall, and the three bronze figures still stand side by side. In the garden, the tùng and trắc bá diệp trees shade the miniature mountain. The sound of water from the Bình Thủy canal still drifts in, as it did on the days when people rowed quietly to this gate to talk about the fate of the country.